Practice daily
While LeBron James did his job of lighting up the Toyota Center during last year’s All-Star game in Houston, the exterior lights forming the arena’s name didn’t do the same. For much of the weekend, they stayed burned out, and Gilbert noticed.
“The thing isn’t the fact that the light is burned out,” Gilbert says. “The thing is, why was it burned out three nights in a row? All you do is call the guy to fix the light. But can your person call the guy? Could you call the guy? If there was a sign on your building and it burned out, would you know who to call?”
Success is in the little things — be it fixing burned out lights or emptying overflowing trash receptacles.
With 5,000 employees across his companies, Gilbert has trained 10,000 eyeballs to constantly improve the minutia. To illustrate his point, he describes how the small things convey an image, such as when one enters an office and “the magazines are Highlights magazines from 1964 with coffee stains on them like you’d see at the dentist office.”
He poses the question: Would the average receptionist think to purchase new magazines and get reimbursed for them to improve the look of the welcome area? Most wouldn’t because of the red tape to cut through to either get permission or get that money back.
“If you trust them to greet your clients — they’re the first person that they see to represent the face of your company — but for them to go out and get new magazines, they would have to go get what? A permission slip? A form?” Gilbert says. “It comes down to trust. You’re paying them money — good money, in most cases — do you trust them? If you pay people for the value of their judgment, you have to let them judge.”
And the little things add up, just as free throws win games not only in the last 60 seconds when the pressure is on but throughout every minute, even when the sense of urgency hasn’t kicked in. The key is getting players to feel a sense of urgency and play hard in the first quarter instead of waiting until the fourth, when a full-court press, foul trouble and fatigue creep up. Whether those players are on the basketball court or in the board room doesn’t matter. When employees take care of the small stuff when clients aren’t around or deals aren’t on the line, it often eliminates a potential crisis or embarrassing situation.
“People aren’t used to or don’t have experience at really looking around all the time,” Gilbert says. “You have to keep reminding yourself. You have to keep reminding everybody. It’s not about necessarily working in your business, but it’s also working on it and taking a step back and being aware of everything.”
When employees leave jobs where they’re tied to their 49-square-foot cubes with rolls of red tape and enter a company that instead empowers them, leaders need to encourage them to voice ideas and solutions.
“They always felt and have known this and wanted it, but they were handcuffed in their decision,” Gilbert says. “They weren’t able to do the things they wanted to do, not because people were bad or wrong or whatever that were running it, but because bureaucracy had built up, and they had to get through too much to make decisions.”
When people proactively make decisions but those decisions lead to mistakes, leadership should commend them for their efforts and help them learn from the mistakes instead of berating and penalizing them. “If you hire good people and you really trust them, and you show them that you trust them, then they’ll trust you,” Gilbert says. “But that means that they’ll make mistakes sometimes, and that’s OK. They can’t be perfect. No one’s perfect. … If you destroy them over one decision, then everybody will be gun-shy, and it won’t work. You have to accept failure. You just gotta keep believing and trusting people, and they’ll trust you back.”
Allowing employees to take initiative, solve problems and make decisions also allows the organization to prosper and minimizes bureaucracy.
“If you want to grow a business, you have to let your people do it, Gilbert says. “You can always give input or opinion, but 99 percent of their decisions, they gotta be able to make.”